Roughing-the-passer call helps Tom Brady, causes controversy in Bucs-Falcons
The Buccaneers kept possession and eventually were able to kneel out the clock for a 21-15 win, but howls arose from those who thought there was nothing wrong with the way Atlanta’s Grady Jarrett sacked Brady.
Among them was Scott Pioli, a former NFL personnel executive who said on Twitter, “I’ve seen a lot of #NFL football in my life, but someone is going to have to explain this roughing the passer call.”
The 57-year-old, who helped draft Brady while with the New England Patriots and whose subsequent stops included a stint in the Falcons’ front office, shared video of the play and added, “I’m not sure I’ve seen anything quite like this.”
On the play, Jarrett chased down Brady, who was corralled after moving to his right in the pocket to evade the defensive tackle. Jarrett grabbed Brady around the hips and slung the 45-year-old quarterback to the turf.
On the Fox Sports telecast, analyst Daryl Johnston criticized the call, saying there was “no intent to hurt the quarterback right there.” He added, “That is not in the spirit of the rule, the way it was created to protect quarterbacks.”
In the NFL rule book, a passage from the section on roughing the passer states: “When tackling a passer who is in a defenseless posture (e.g., during or just after throwing a pass), a defensive player must not unnecessarily or violently throw him down or land on top of him with all or most of the defender’s weight.”
Jerome Boger, the head of the officiating crew in Tampa, said after the game: “What I had was the defender grabbed the quarterback while he was still in the pocket, and unnecessarily throwing him to the ground. That is what I was making my decision based upon.”
Boger was asked if his crew “made a specific measure to try to watch out” for such treatment of quarterbacks, given the play’s similarity to one on which the Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa was injured in Week 4.
“No, not necessarily,” he replied via a pool reporter.
“It was a terrible call,” Tony Dungy, an NBC Sports analyst and former Buccaneers coach, said in a tweet. “They have to protect all players, including the QBs. But Jarrett did nothing wrong. I believe this call was an overreaction to Tua last week.”
Some who chimed in online suggested that the identity of the sack victim — in this case, the NFL’s biggest star and arguably its all-time greatest quarterback — affected the officials’ willingness to blow a whistle on the play.
“The Falcons got ROBBED,” former NFL quarterback Robert Griffin III, now an ESPN analyst, said on Twitter. “Hitting the QB hard does not equal Roughing the Passer even if it’s Tom Brady.”
“The roughing call they just gave to Brady might be the most embarrassingly bad NFL call in five years,” ESPN’s…
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